My+Final+Portfolio


 * My Portfolio **

Table of Contents

Letter of Introduction

Meditation on Essential Question 1

Meditation on Essential Question 2

Meditation on Essential Question 3

(major assignments included)

Dear Reader,

Over the course of this semester, I have benefited enormously from reflecting on the experiences I've had as a student-teacher and the major issues regarding literacy and teaching, which we have discussed in class. These issues will be illuminated in this portfolio. I've greatly enjoyed instructing and helping the high school students with their work and noticed that many of the issues we have been discussing are relevant to their everyday lives. In class, we discussed prejudices plaguing speakers of Ebonics. When people don't use standard English, the English developed by Caucasians, they are often regarded as stupid. At the school where I taught, many of the kids were anything but stupid. However, they struggled with standard English. The majority of the students were African-American and Latino speakers of Ebonics with great trouble building their vocabularies, writing in standard English without grammatical mistakes, and impressing their English teachers who seemed thoroughly discouraged by their natural way of speaking. Some of their teachers seemed determined to replace it with standard English. Many of these students had never read a book, and, through working with them, I developed a sense of just how prevalent illiteracy and literacy issues are.

This semester, I've written about philosophical issues relating to language and democracy which I've never considered before, such as whether the U.S. should have a national language, learned about how to teach in ethnically diverse classrooms, struggled with Lisa Delpit's notion about language, power, and prejudice, realized how desperately ELA needs to be taught, and acquired new skills to teach grammar. I've been fascinated by the ideas of Delpit and James Baldwin as they relate to language, bigotry, and notions of literacy in the African-American and Latino community. In the classroom, I sometimes found myself telling students that in order to access the culture of power, they would have to speak the language of power, while teaching them to write compound sentences using the FANBOYS rule. I'm also grateful to have learned that pronouns can simply be called names, and that coordinating conjunctions can be called logical linkers and referred to as FANBOYS, an excellent pneumonic device.

Although I disagree with Delpit's notion of why standard English is the language of power, I think her writing can help motivate struggling students to learn academic English and strive for success in their futures. I've read that German is the most precise scientific language. If this is true, it is not a coincidence that Einstein and Freud were German. I wish Delpit had discussed her notion of the strengths and weaknesses, the areas of precision and imprecision, intrinsic to each way of speaking before deciding why one is the language of power. I imagine the answer has as much to do with how precisely the language can be used, say, to conduct medical research, as it does with prejudice.

The major philosophical issue which I've given the most thought regards whether America should have a national language, and it's an issue about which I've changed my mind since I first wrote about it. Since I think English will continue to serve this country more effectively than any other language, I voted to make English the national language. However, upon later reflection, I thought that if America has anything to be proud of, it is its democracy. I think the American people should have the right to, say, write school text books in any language the majority deems fit, even if I think the choice is self-destructive. It would be dictatorial, and inconsistent with American values, to impose a national language. I think the language and the achievements of the people who speak it are intricately connected, and it would be a mistake to adopt the language of a country which hasn't achieved as much.

At the beginning of the semester, I mined my past to unearth my history as a language-user and recalled the pivotal events in my development as a reader and a writer. I discussed the books I read as a child, adolescent, and adult, whether I always liked to read, why and how I became a reader, and the people who were instrumental in bringing books into my life and broadening my interests. Today, I would answer that question from a cultural perspective. I've come to realize that my history as a language user has to do with far more than reading. It concerns the people whose voices I chose to imitate both in my life and in popular culture, why I imitated certain attitudes and assumed certain political identities, and what I associated with each different code I chose to assimilate along with my developing taste in literature. If my students were to write their histories as language users, they might not mention any books, but their narratives could be as rich and compelling as any.

This class entailed three essential questions:

How does students’ language development affect their learning?

How can we bridge the gap between home and school literacies?

How are social identity, power, and academic literacy related?

Throughout this portfolio, we are going to discuss them in detail.